Largest Wrongful Termination Verdicts and Settlements

The largest wrongful termination verdict on record is the $464.5 million a Los Angeles County jury awarded two former Southern California Edison employees in June 2022 for discrimination and retaliation. But the largest wrongful termination verdicts and settlements rarely pay out at the headline number. Federal damage caps, constitutional limits on punitive damages, and appellate reversals routinely cut jury awards to a small fraction of what was announced in the courtroom.

The Record Verdicts

The Edison award to Alfredo Martinez and Justin Page included $24.6 million in compensatory damages and $440 million in punitive damages. Edison said it intended to challenge the decision and seek a new trial.¹

Also in 2022, a federal jury in the Southern District of Texas returned a $366 million verdict for Jennifer Harris, a Black former saleswoman who sued FedEx Corporate Services for race discrimination. The jury awarded $365 million in punitive damages and roughly $1.16 million in compensatory damages.² The Fifth Circuit later gutted that award, ruling that Harris’s employment contract barred her Section 1981 claims and that FedEx had shown a good-faith effort to comply with anti-discrimination law. Under Title VII’s statutory cap, the $366 million dropped to roughly $249,000.³

Other large verdicts round out the top of the list:

$167 million in 2012, awarded by a Sacramento federal jury to physician assistant Ani Chopourian against Catholic Healthcare West for sexual harassment and wrongful termination.⁴
$105 million in June 2026, awarded by a San Diego jury to a substance abuse counselor.⁵
$52 million in 2026, awarded by a Los Angeles jury to five former Sysco Riverside employees who alleged they were fired for reporting unsafe driving and improper food handling. The award included $31 million compensatory and $21 million punitive.⁶
$41.5 million in 2023, awarded by a California jury to former Kaiser Permanente neonatal charge nurse Maria Gatchalian for wrongful termination and whistleblower retaliation, with $30 million in punitive damages.⁷

Why These Numbers Shrink

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1991, compensatory and punitive damages in Title VII and ADA cases are capped by employer size. For employers with more than 500 workers, the combined ceiling is $300,000. Juries are not told about the cap during deliberations, so a jury can return a $36 million verdict believing it is sending a message, only for the judge to reduce the payout to $300,000 by operation of law. Back pay and front pay sit outside the cap; emotional distress and punitive damages do not.⁸

Victor Robinson’s case shows the mechanic at work. Robinson, a deaf truck driver, sued Werner Enterprises after the company refused to hire him. A Nebraska federal jury awarded him $36 million in punitive damages and $75,000 in compensatory damages in September 2023. The judge cut the total to $300,000 plus roughly $35,682 in lost wages.⁹ The Eighth Circuit affirmed the reduction in July 2025.¹⁰

Even outside the federal cap, judges cut punitive awards on constitutional grounds when the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages looks excessive. In 2026, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge struck down an $83 million punitive award in an age discrimination case against Liberty Mutual Insurance, calling the 4.15-to-1 ratio “grossly excessive” and the underlying conduct insufficient to support a finding of malice.¹¹ In the Gatchalian case, the trial judge tentatively upheld the $11.5 million compensatory award but ruled the $30 million punitive award excessive, giving the plaintiff 21 days to accept a reduction to $10 million or face a new trial on punitive damages alone.⁷

The federal cap does not apply to state-law claims in many jurisdictions, which is why so many of the surviving big-money awards come from California. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act imposes no cap on compensatory or punitive damages.¹² New York state and city human rights laws also lack damage caps.¹³ Congress has considered eliminating the federal cap through the Equal Remedies Act of 2024, but similar attempts since 1991 have failed.⁸

The Largest Settlements

Settlements are a different animal from verdicts. They reflect what both sides agreed to after weighing litigation risk, not what a jury decided. The biggest ones tend to involve class actions, government enforcement, or whistleblower retaliation claims built on strong documentary evidence.

The largest documented settlement for a whistleblower retaliation claim under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act came in March 2025. Carlos Domenech Zornoza, former CEO of two SunEdison subsidiaries, received $34.5 million after a federal judge in Maryland found he was fired for warning SunEdison’s board that top executives were misrepresenting the company’s financial condition to investors. The case took nearly a decade, starting with a 2016 Department of Labor complaint and ending with a two-week bench trial in 2024 and a settlement on the eve of a damages trial.¹⁴

Among EEOC-brokered settlements, the $20.5 million consent decree against Jackson National Life Insurance in January 2020 was reported as the largest in a single EEOC lawsuit in over a decade.¹⁵ The EEOC alleged a hostile work environment in the insurer’s Denver and Nashville offices, with racial slurs directed at Black employees, sexual harassment by high-level managers, and retaliation against a white vice president who refused to issue negative evaluations to Black women who had complained. The settlement covered 21 former employees and included a four-year consent decree with mandatory anti-discrimination training and an outside compliance review.¹⁶ Jackson National did not admit to violating any laws.¹⁷

Other notable EEOC-enforced settlements include $20 million from Walmart in 2020 over a hiring test that disproportionately screened out women, and $18 million from Activision Blizzard in 2022 over sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination.¹⁸

What Typical Cases Actually Pay

Nine-figure verdicts make news because they are outliers. The great majority of wrongful termination cases settle, and over 95% of employment lawsuits never reach a jury.¹⁹

Settlement values cluster into rough tiers. Simpler cases with limited evidence and short employment tenure may settle for $5,000 to $30,000. Cases with clear violations and measurable wage losses typically land between $30,000 and $100,000. Cases with egregious discrimination, substantial lost income, or real punitive exposure can reach $100,000 to well over $1 million.¹²

Several factors consistently move the number up or down:

Legal representation. Claimants with attorneys averaged $48,800 in settlements nationally, compared to $19,200 for those without, with a 64% success rate versus 30%.¹²
Income level. Higher earners command larger settlements because back pay and front pay calculations are tied to salary, bonuses, and benefits.
Employer size. Employers with more than 100 workers paid nearly double the average settlement of smaller ones.¹²
Jurisdiction. California civil rights cases averaged $147,843 in 2023, partly because the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act allows unlimited compensatory and punitive damages.¹²
Evidence. Discriminatory emails, recordings, or witness statements raise settlement leverage. A reasonable settlement offer is generally described as covering 50 to 70 percent of the estimated best-case trial outcome, adjusted for litigation risk and cost.¹³

Plaintiffs also have a duty to mitigate damages by seeking new employment, and income earned after termination is typically deducted from a damage award.¹⁹ That is one more reason the gap between a jury’s announced figure and a plaintiff’s actual recovery can be so wide.

1
Los Angeles Times. Former Southern California Edison Employees Verdict Sexual Harassment Retaliation
2
ePerils. Large Loss List EPL Table
3
Bloomberg Law. Slashed $366 Million Bias Verdict Shows Damage Cap Downsides
4
1000Attorneys. Biggest Settlements California Wrongful Termination
5
Proskauer. Jury Verdicts
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Withrow Employment Law. Retaliation Is the New Discrimination
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Courthouse News Service. Kaiser Pleads to Scrap Nurse’s $41.5 Million Retaliation Verdict
8
National Employment Lawyers Association. Damage Caps
9
EEOC. Nebraska Court Orders Trucking Company to Pay Deaf Driver Punitive Damages Lost Wages
10
FindLaw. EEOC v. Drivers Management LLC
11
Proskauer. $103 Million Thermonuclear Age Discrimination Verdict Overturned in Los Angeles
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Kingsley & Kingsley. Average Wrongful Termination Settlement Amounts
13
Nisar Law. Available Damages Guide
14
Hinckley Allen. Hinckley Allen Prevails in $34.5 Million SOX Litigation
15
Bloomberg Law. Jackson National EEOC $20.5 Million Harassment Pact Approved
16
EEOC. Jackson National Life Insurance to Pay $20.5 Million to Settle EEOC Lawsuit
17
HR Dive. Jackson National Life Pays $20.5M to Settle Race, Sex Discrimination Suit
18
EEOC. EEOC History 2020-2024
19
FindLaw. Wrongful Termination Settlements: What Can I Expect